


Soma - A Kylux Brave New World AU

by Lilander



Category: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Play, Consensual bondage, Definitely not healthy, Dominant Kylo Ren, F/M, M/M, Medical, Minor Character Death, Minor Hux/everyone, Multi, Murder in the World State, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Orgasm Denial, Orgy, Recreational Drug Use, Spanking, Submissive Armitage Hux, Violence, gratuitous shakespeare, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-10-31 21:57:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17857694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilander/pseuds/Lilander
Summary: Director of Emotional Engineering Armitage Hux tests a new re-education technique on an outsider who'll try anything to find happiness.----------------“You’re not alone,” Hux says.Ben’s lips part in something like hope.“No one’s alone, of course. Everyone is happy here, everyone belongs to everyone else.”Ben looks away. Hux suffers a strange unease, like the conditioned truths of the World State are something indecent.





	Soma - A Kylux Brave New World AU

“Of course I’ve never heard of failed conditioning in an Alpha Double-Plus,” Phasma says as she pulls her acetate panties over her thighs. Hux lies in bed smoking off the customary shreds of these nights, thinking of breakfast and his meeting with the World Controller in two hours. The Director of Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning is so uncommonly pretty Hux almost never resorts to soma when he has her, but at her words he regrets the decision to face the day without his artificial well-being.

“You must be looking at something mechanical," she says. Her final kiss, he declines, but he accepts her fond grope with professional courtesy. "Alcohol in the fetal substrate, maybe. Whatever it is, take care of it before Snoke finds out you’ve got Alpha failures.”

Hux exhales, a stream of vetiver albuterol. “It's purely hypothetical."

"I should hope so," she says.

 

***

The melancholy clings to him all the way to Snoke’s office. If Phasma ruled it out, it’s not possible; the queer mood that’s settled over him these past months isn’t a failure of his childhood conditioning.

 _Something mechanical. Too much alcohol in the substrate._ The thought rankles; he’s no degenerate. If it were a fetal problem it would’ve shown up before now. It would’ve affected his height, his physique, his intelligence, but all fall to standard, no more than a quarter-percentile deviation from targets in all categories. This is something else.

“Ah, Hux.” Snoke seems oddly grateful to be interrupted. “I have your next research subject for the Adult Reconditioning experiment.”

The stranger is Snoke's office is beastly. Obscene. Of indeterminate age, perhaps younger than Hux himself, he exhibits a face that might have been handsome but for the monstrous scar bisecting it in defiance of all respectable hygiene and decorum.

“This Savage escaped from the Reservation in New Mexico. He’s come here looking to learn our ways.”

Hux tries to cover his alarm. Shouldn't he be restrained? “My method was hardly designed to tame a savage _,_ Your Fordliness. It requires at least some verbal ability—”

“I have some verbal ability, Director.”

The savage speaks in a disarming baritone that slides across Hux’s lips like velvetone. His hair is much too long, and his solid black suit, despite its fashionable cut, makes him look like the growth-hormone-supplemented Epsilons they breed for factory work in the tropics. He’s got an Alpha’s height though, and an Alpha’s sharp gaze.

Snoke’s _tsk_ is almost doting. “His language is good enough. He had some access to aboriginal books on the reservation, and likes to parrot them. _Fiction,_ if you can believe it. _Drama._ ” The World Controller pronounces the words with distaste. “At any rate, Hux, I’d entrust this to no one but you.

Hux hears the veiled promise. Snoke knows perfectly well he’d like to put his hat in the ring for Deputy World Controller for London. “Sir, does he understand the treatment? Is he willing?”

Those flushed, vulgar lips press together, and the savage speaks. “I understand, Director Hux. If you saw what I came from, you'd understand how wiling I am.”

 

***

The existence of failed conditioning is an open secret among the highest levels of leadership. There’s hardly a need for strict security—after all, the poor bastards usually report themselves to their superiors, desperate to know why the soma doesn't cure them.

But Hux has never met anyone who had no conditioning at all. It’s a delicious challenge, an exquisite torture, to wrangle the raw power of this man into something sophisticated.

The first morning of the forth week, Hux finds his patient staring into the mirror with the remains of a bandage in his hand.

“That scar’s healed nicely,” Hux says, flicking the syringe. “Dr. Mitaka did an admirable job. You look almost civilized.”

He crushes the bandage and throws it across the room. “I am civilized.”

“Not yet. A civilized man would pick up his rubbish.” Hux brandishes the syringe full of psychotropic serum. “Come here now, bend over.”

“I don’t want the drugs. I just want to understand.”

“The adult mind is already too set to take the conditioning. If you want to learn our ways, you need to regain some neuroplasticity. It’s already beginning.”

Beginning, but the progress is too slow for Hux. His strange savage customs hamper the work—he refuses to have a woman, or a man for that matter, and he refuses soma.

The eyes of the savage glint with something dangerous, but he folds down the hem of his trousers to make way for the needle in his hip.

Hux doesn’t even blame him for refusing the soma. Even for him, it’s not enough.

***

He joins Phasma, Edrison, and Dopheld for a few rounds of Obstacle Golf that evening before his required Solidarity Service, but he can’t shake a slight nausea.

“Won’t the savage join us?”

“His name is Ben.”

“And is it true,” Edrison says to his fellow Director as he lines up the next shot, “that you haven’t had him yet? The two of you spend so much time together.”

“His people have peculiar ideas about sex. _Monogamy,_ if you can believe it.”

The Betas waiting politely for them to finish titter and blush at the profanity, and Phasma chuckles.

“Honestly, Hux,” she says, “you better be careful before you get accused of that yourself. You’ve been spending too much time with the man. People are whispering.”

Dopheld nods. “I don’t think I’ve had you for three weeks, and we never did manage to schedule Escalator Squash.”

The conversation drifts to where Dopheld bought his jacket, and Hux frowns at Peavey’s ball as it rolls into the hole for a double-birdie to take the lead.

A the Solidarity Service Hux claims a seat next to a pretty little Beta-Minus technician called Rey. When the soma’s passed around and Hux has relaxed into the sway of the synthetic music and the opioid haze, they all begin to dance and chant. _Orgy-porgy orgy-porgy._ Rey laughs with religious ecstasy and calls out the name of the Ford when Hux slides his hands up her acetate blouse, and Rose from the Fertilization Lab kisses her from behind, and when Rey comes shuddering on his fingers, Hux almost enjoys it.

***

“On the Reservation they told us freedom would make us happy, but it didn’t,” Ben says one evening after he’s shot down Hux’s  advances yet again.

“Is it any wonder?” Hux asks, sitting beside him on the windowseat. Ben eyes him with suspicion but doesn’t move away. “How can you expect to be happy if you haven’t been conditioned and properly prepared for your place in life? How can you be happy when you’re always subject to violent passions?”

Ben's breath fogs the glass.

“I thought I’d find answers here.” The savage rests his head against Hux's window with his hands around his knees, studying the shards of London poking up from the mist. “I’ve never felt so alone.”

“You’re not alone.”

Ben’s eyes flash; his lips part in something like hope.

“No one’s alone, of course. Everyone is happy here, everyone belongs to everyone else.”

Ben looks away. Hux suffers a strange unease, like the conditioned truths of the World State are something indecent.

***

 

The next day Ben starts quoting that aboriginal nonsense again and Hux resolves to ask Snoke’s leave to abandon the project. He’s spending far too much time on this thankless task and getting nothing, not even a bedmate, in return.

“What on Earth’s the matter? I trained you out of this foolishness two weeks ago.”

The savage shakes his head and stares off into the distance. “I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me—”

“For Ford’s sake—”

The savage rounds on him. “You say it wearies you, but how I caught it, what stuff 'tis made of—“ Ben stops, and sighs. He turns away. “And whereof it is born—I am to learn. I thought I’d learn.”

“You’re a strange creature,” Hux says.

“You’re a psychiatrist. If you don’t understand me, what hope do I have? What hope does any man have?”

Hux reaches for the needle, and the savage, head bowed, has already begun to ease down his trousers. Hux glances at his notebook, thinks of his experiment, of the accolades he’ll get at the Directors’ gala for conditioning an adult savage.

“Not today,” Hux says. He shuts the syringe box with mock nonchalance. Ben's black eyebrows crease, but he straightens and nods.

When the savage leaves, Hux downs a half-gramme and goes in search of Assistant Director Dameron. It feels good to run his fingers through dark hair, to feel a man panting below him, and forget.

***

“Just a gramme. You’re having a reaction to the lower dosage, you need soma.”

The savage tosses the proffered pills to the carpet. “ _That_ won’t help! Dr. Peavey already tried to sneak it into my food. And stay away from me with that syringe.”

Hux thought skipping a dose would help, but he was clearly mistaken. The savage’s disquiet borders on mania, and Hux grabs at his trousers and aims the needle. “The psychotropics will help.”

Ben’s powerful hand stops Hux’s wrist, and the syringe with it. He gazes down at Hux—it’s alluring, it’s intoxicating, for someone to stare _down_ at an Alpha Double-Plus.

Ben gently pries the syringe out of Hux’s fingers. For some reason Hux can't discern, he allows it, but freezes when the savage grazes the tip of the loaded needle along Hux's cheek. A dozen safety violations tick through Hux’s mind but his body is immobile and quivering, like he’s downed four grammes at a sitting. This is something new.

The savage traces the needle up the perfect Roman line of Hux’s nose, across the ginger eyebrow. He licks his lips, considering something, then lets the cool metal come to rest against the skin of Hux's upper eyelid, drawing it closed. The barb brushes against his eyelashes. Hux is too afraid to breathe, and too excited.

“You need medicine,” Hux says again, mimicking calm, pretending the savage isn’t thinking of stabbing him in the eye. “You’re sick.”

Hux exhales in relief when the needle disappears but he doesn’t open his eyes. He hears the clack of the syringe on the table, and lets out a low, surprised sound when the prick of the needle is replaced by soft, warm lips against his eyelashes.

“Yes I am.”

***

Hux paces across the lime carpet of his penthouse, smoking and cursing. The fucking savage is toying with him. A _savage_ is toying with _him,_ an Alpha Double-Plus.

Those lips on his face and neck reduced Hux to pathetic mewling. Those long, incongruously elegant hands unfastened Hux’s shirt buttons one by one. Filthy, offensive, deviant—why couldn’t the man just unzip his trousers like any decent person would? The idea of _begging_ someone for a shag, it’s absurd.

He actually stopped Hux from stripping off—he wrapped Hux’s wrists in medical tape. Nothing untoward about that, of course. Phasma enjoys that sort of thing in her more playful moods, and so does Dopheld, and of course there’s Dameron, who loves to chat in the office about his evenings tied up on Hux’s bed.

But Hux is usually the one with the ropes, and the whole thing isn’t normally preceded by an hour of achingly, torturously gentle exploration of his body. Ben pushed him onto the plastic pad of the examination bed and murmured archaic nonsense into his ear between kisses.

_I have seen a medicine that can breathe life into a stone, quicken a rock…ah, Hux, tell me about violent passions. I love to watch you come undone._

And Hux was undone. Unsatisfied in every physiological sense, but undone, completely and utterly. The degenerate left him naked, achingly hard, taped to his own examination bed with a line of Ben’s come down his shoulderblades.

“I think I’ve found the answer,” Ben says as he leaves. He stuffs a wad of gauze in Hux’s mouth and doesn’t tell Hux where he’s gone. 

***

Ben is missing for two days. Hux covers it up because he desperately doesn’t want to explain to the World Controller why his patient has been off psychotropics for a week.

Ben knocks on his door at two in the morning, looking like some wild, frantic angel. Hux opens his mouth to lecture him about safety and to yell at him for spending three hours on a Tuesday afternoon trying to cut himself out of his restraints with a scalpel and his mouth.

But Ben swallows his reply, and his hands roam over Hux’s bare chest, pulls down the loose pajama trousers.

“What in Ford’s name’s gotten into you?”

Ben sloughs out of his trousers, then throws off his shirt. There’s a dark stain on the front. “I told you,” he says as he pushes down his underwear, revealing him hard, already dripping, “I found the answer.”

“What’s the answer? What’s the question? Ben--?”

Hux stops when Ben, naked now, grips the sides of his head so hard Hux fears he’s performing some ritual where he’ll crush Hux’s skull and drink strong wine from his cranium. But Ben only holds him still, planting his nonsensical verses on Hux’s lips and chin and cheeks between his kisses. “Passion, and murder—Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

Hux can’t breathe, he feels like he’s overdosed, he moans. “What variety? Ben, what have you done?”

Ben pushes him to the bed and swipes the bottle from Hux’s nightstand. He drags Hux’s hips flush with the edge of the bed and pushes his legs up, over his broad shoulders. The angle hurts Hux’s back, and he can’t stop trying to close his legs, almost like he’s a savage himself, possessed by modesty.

“Do you want this?” Ben asks, suddenly still, but a taut stillness.

Hux’s thigh muscles contract, and he makes some half-unintelligible plea for more, yes, I want this. The slick is cold on his entrance, the finger warm. Three, four, five pumps and Ben’s too impatient to wait for more, so he eases in centimeter by aching centimeter.

“Hush,” Ben says as he bends over him. “Hush. Relax, Hux. Look at me.”

This is not fair. Hux’s breath comes fast and he asks for more, faster, more, but Ben only leans forward more, bending Hux almost double beneath him, letting his face get close enough that his too-long black hair tickles Hux’s eyebrows. That irregular nose ghosts along his own, and again he locks Hux’s face in his hands, forcing him to look into his eyes.

 Sex should be a pleasant set of physical sensations, a release of chemicals. Not this.

When Ben is satisfied Hux understands, he lowers his lips to kiss the tears on Hux’s cheek, and moves.

 

***

When morning comes, Hux sees the stain on Ben’s shirt is brick red, and feels the nausea return.

“Do you want to see the answer?”

“What is it? Have you been in the fetal processing unit?”

Ben smiles. “Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.”

Hux doesn’t know who the woman is, but yes, now he’s been satisfied, but he’s starving. He’ll glut on Ben and his savage passions until he starves.

“Let me show you, Hux.”

Hux protests all the way to the distant patch of park where Ben begins to smile. _Let me show you._

Hux recoils from Dopheld’s body and pulls at his own hair. “What have you done? Why did you—You beast, what have you done?”

Ben wipes the knife on one of the broad leaves of the hemlock, and smiles. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

***

 

Hux didn’t go straight to the World Controller. He didn’t address the police. He didn’t confess to gross negligence in re-education that led to a savage running around London _murdering people._

And Hux didn’t ask for the restraints, but he didn’t protest them either. There is no god, there is only Ford and Social Unity, losing yourself in One. There is no confession. But Hux wants to confess, Hux wants to be punished.

His sweat-slick wrists rub uselessly against the ties binding him to the headboard.

Naked, Hux is quite helpless while Ben hovers over him, tracing the contours of his body. The air-conditioned breeze raises goosebumps on his bare skin, and so do Ben’s nails.

Hux’s mouth falls open at the bite. Ben worries at the flesh of his ass like a fox chewing carrion, drawing out a long moan that turns to helpless panting at the first brush of a finger nipping inside.

“You’ll help me.”

“Don’t be—ah—don’t—absurd. Whatever urges you have are dangerous, beyond the pale.”

He twists his finger, and adds a second.

“You’re not disgusted,” Ben challenges. “You’re like me. You’re tired of the games, the lies. You want something real.”

“I won’t—no—ah, yes, yes, please—”

The cruel and glorious fingers disappear. Hux expects blunt pressure at his entrance, but instead, the white heat of Ben’s open palm makes him grunt. Five more slaps, ten, and those fingers reappear, stroking that spot, and the merciless hand raises welts on his skin. The assault forces from Hux the filthiest obscenities he knows, overheard on the exiles’ island when he’d had to visit.

“You savage, mother of God, mother of God, you bastard, yes, _yes,_ please—"

The hand stills, but so do the fingers. Hux bucks helplessly against the bed before a hand, gentle this time, makes soothing strokes against his burning skin.

Ben’s voice is punishing. “Infirm of purpose. Give me the daggers.”

“I can’t—can’t pretend to understand—your primitive ramblings—”

Hux sucks in a breath when Ben wrenches his head up, forcing his neck to a painful angle. Ben’s hair has fallen forward, betraying his own need and making him look every inch the savage, and he inserts himself between the headboard and Hux’s face and bends down to kiss him, drinking him in.

“Ben,” Hux pants.

“Help me.”

“I’m not a murderer.”

“Goddamn it. God _damn_ it. Hux, you _have to help me or I will die here._ ”

He gives Hux some air, holding his chin so high off the bed that Hux has to come up to his knees to avoid a broken neck.

Hux tips forward and Ben catches him on those lips, but soon enough Ben unfastens his belt and forces Hux back down, still cuffed to the headboard, to give Ben what he needs. When Hux, with his nose pressed into the curling black hairs below Ben’s abdomen, hears the telltale panting, he pulls off and begs for what he wants.

Ben whispers his own profanity as he fucks Hux into the bed. _I love you, I fucking love you, Hux—_

_Filthy, I—_

_Tell me. Tell me the truth. Say something fucking real._

“Yes, I love you, Ben, I love you—”

“And you’ll—help—me—"

Ben fucks the yes out of him. Yes, for love, Hux will murder.

***

 

“An Epsilon found him, sir, and the body was so disordered we had to send the poor bugger back to death conditioning. The Epsilons can’t always take it, you know, death, when it doesn’t look exactly like their samples.”

In the anomalous summer heat the midges have come quickly, peppering Edrison Peavey’s uncovered corpse and forcing the Beta investigators to swat them away. Hux covers his nose with a scented handkerchief, tuberose and sandalwood and something aerosol. It’s the forth kill in two weeks and the scent of death has begun to bother him. He feels no shame in this. His conditioning prepared him for the experience of death, not for the stench.

He has to get back to the office. The nurses run the supply inventory each Friday and Hux needs to empty this weeks’ psychotropic serum doses down the sink.

A green-clad gamma takes advantage of Hux’s presence to divest herself of her opinion. “Right after the Community Sing! Fordy, Fordy, can you imagine?”

Hux has a headache. He still carries soma, just in case, but isn’t even tempted.

 

***

Weeks pass. Hux’s hypnopaedic conditioning told him to be grateful he’s free of violent passions, because passions always wane and leave one less satisfied than one was before. Passion is fickle.

At first he thought this would go on forever. But Ben is a connoisseur of passion; Ben knew, Ben should have told him it wouldn’t be long before he tired of Hux.

It’s only a fear. The one time Hux voices it, while Ben cleans the blood out of his clothes, the man wraps him in his arms and recites love poetry that Hux doesn’t understand. Hux tries to understand. More and more, he tries.

But he’s a psychiatrist. He observes Ben’s behavior, notes how he pushes Hux away.

 

***

 

What used to be the World Controller’s office is nothing but a tower of smoke. Sirens beg him to stay calm.

“The World Controller is dead! Snoke is—”

“This is awful, awful, I’ve forgotten my tablets, has anyone got—”

“Here, here, come with me, half-gramme, cherry cola, here, darling, here.”

Hux stumbles, coughing, through the ash, deafened by the speakers blaring overhead.

  _My friends,_ _my friends, I want so much for you to get along, won’t you be calm, won’t you be happy?_

 

***

 

Hux finds Ben sitting on a bench feeding some pigeons and studying the flocks of helicopters spewing anti-riot gas and soothing propaganda down on the crowds. Calm.

"When beggars die there are no comets seen,” he observes by way of greeting. “But the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

Hux sits stiffly beside him.

“This is _preposterous._ ”

The brown eyes delve into his, curious. The pigeons go hungry. Hux refuses to be swayed.

 “This cannot continue. I’m not a—murderer!”

“ _Preposterous,”_ Ben murmurs. “Say it again.” The fingers trace Hux’s lips. They smell industrial, unsanitary. “Say it.”

Hux captures Ben’s wrist and tries to turn away, but the hand tightens around his jaw.

“Say it.”

“This is serious.”

“Yes,” the savage says, sliding two unsanitary fingers across Hux’s reluctant, obedient tongue. “I remember. This is what serious feels like.”

 

***

Fevers are lewd these days, and lurid, and Hux knows the curious dreams don’t come from a fever. When he wakes one night, crying out, Ben’s hand is around his throat and he’s kissing wet lines across Hux’s ribcage.

“O, my offense is rank,” he whispers. Hux scoffs, and turns his back.

“Must you? You scared the hell out of me.”

 The hand on his neck tightens, then disappears.

Hux finds himself on his stomach, pressed into the pillow. The sound of spit is the only warning before the rude pressure at his entrance and the pain that forces him to suck in air. Hux grimaces, but despite the rough start, the movements are gentle, the fingers soft as they trace the ripples of Hux’s spine.

“My offense is rank,” he recites it like a lullaby, “it smells to heaven…”

Hux moves his hips and cries, and tells himself it’s a normal physiological response to excessive stress and pleasure, nothing a good round of drugs won’t cure. With a groan, Ben comes, and coaxes Hux onto his back with gentleness that forces Hux to cover his face with the duvet, and Hux gulps air against the fabric while Ben feathers kisses along his inner thigh and the soft skin of his scrotum. Ben tugs at the ginger hairs and eases Hux into that swollen, degenerate mouth, and Hux jerks against the hands that pin him until he comes with a sob.

 

***

The syringe swings in Hux’s pocket like a lead pipe, and when Ben hauls down Hux’s trousers and slicks him with two greedy fingers, Hux is terrified it will roll across the floor and give him away, and the terror excites him. Ben’s hands bruise his hips until Hux’s knees are rugburned and his ass is sore, and Hux comes shouting with his cheek in the cigarette-stale carpet and a dribble of spit down his chin.

Hux slides out of those arms while Ben sleeps and goes to the washroom. Just taking a piss, except for the contraband, the syringe smuggled into bed.

The drugs work quickly—a good thing for Hux, who would’ve died there, naked, straddling that magnificent body with Ben’s hand around his windpipe.

The hands loosen and Ben whispers something, his eyes glazing as they watch the moonlight sparkle on the syringe Hux has raised like a knife. _O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die._

***

Consent is a memory. This goes against Hux’s conditioning but there’s nothing to be done for the savage’s protests; he’s a danger to society.

It takes six weeks.

They pass Ben around the Directors’ gala like the soma cup at a Solidarity Service. Until the World Controller’s office is cleared, they’re using a glass-roofed garden ballroom, appropriately cheerful to take everyone’s mind off the unsuccessful search for the ‘disturbance’ at the World Controller’s office.

The whole night, Ben pinches buttocks and fondles breasts, he politely sets engagements for aeronautical tennis, he wishes everyone a productive Fordsday. In all respects he’s a perfect gentleman.

Mr. Finn, the interim  World Controller they sent in from Nairobi, can’t keep his eyes off him. “Remarkable work, Hux, truly a remarkable feat of conditioning.”

And it is. A queer thing, stripping away everything remarkable in a man to make him remarkable.

Ben goes home with Mr. Finn and compliments the man’s pneumatic thighs in the office the following morning. He asks Hux for a round of escalator squash. Hux declines.

*** 

He still lets Ben have him sometimes, when two grammes is lighter than his loneliness. It’s always pleasant, perfectly satisfactory. A testament to Hux’s skill, a professional triumph.

Remarkable.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Kylux fic and first AU, and I'd love to know what you think! Feel free to say hi [on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/lilandersw).


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